Educating the public, particularly about 10-digit dialing, could be one of the heaviest lifts for LECs in implementing one three-digit national suicide prevention hotline number, regional carriers and experts told us. Meeting North American numbering plan administrator (NANPA) milestones for the unified 988 number could be a challenge, they said, though local carriers didn't foresee big problems. Verizon said Dec. 21 it had implemented such dialing for its wireless customers, though landline customers won't have that until July 2022.
Lumen restored 911 service in eight Minnesota counties where dispatchers couldn’t hear callers’ voices on emergency calls Monday, said the Minnesota Department of Public Safety's Emergency Communication Networks division. The division reported 911 service restored at 9:20 p.m. It reported earlier that it was alerted to problems at 3 p.m. Affected counties were Dodge, Freeborn, Mower, Olmsted, Rice, Steele, Wabasha and Winona. “Some customers in southeastern Minnesota experienced a disruption in 911 service,” a Lumen spokesperson said Tuesday. “All services have been restored.” Affected callers could hear the 911 dispatcher, but dispatchers couldn’t hear callers from 12:56-8:08 p.m., the division said in a Tuesday update. As a workaround, public safety answering points used displayed caller information to contact callers over administrative lines. PSAPs urged people to use 10-digit nonemergency numbers, and text-to-911 was working, the division said. No emergency calls went unanswered, it said. Lumen initially blamed a fiber cut, and now blames “a bad card that supports a large national fiber” in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the division said. Engineers restored service by rebooting the faulty equipment. Lumen’s investigation continues and will provide a “reason for outage” in three to five business days, per its contract. The outage occurred during the final year of the state’s five-year contract with the former CenturyLink.
Nebraska cleared an $8 million, five-year next-generation 911 contract with Lumen over the Public Service Commission’s lone Democrat, Crystal Rhoades, the PSC said Tuesday. “Lumen has a proven track record of 911 failures nationally and in Nebraska,” she said. “I don’t believe awarding them the contract is prudent given they are currently under investigation.” The company agreed to pay $500,000 to the FCC and faces a possible $7.2 million fine in Washington state over a multistate 911 outage in late 2018 as CenturyLink (see 2012230021). With Intrado, Lumen will provide NG-911 core services for geospatial locating and routing. Lumen will get $815,000 the first year and $1.8 million each of the next four years. The PSC may extend the contract up to 10 years. “Once the contract is signed, we’ll sit down with representatives of Lumen to set priorities and a timeline to begin the process of connecting regions” of public safety answering points to the ESInet, with the goal of connecting all regions by 2023, said David Sankey, state 911 director. Lumen knows "that when someone calls 911, seconds count and we take that responsibility seriously,” a spokesperson emailed.
The FCC is monitoring telecom and 911 outages caused by the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, a spokesperson said Monday. The bomb was in an RV parked next to a major AT&T central office, which was badly damaged in the blast and a subsequent fire. Industry officials said FCC staff will likely look more closely at the broader implications and how to better protect operations centers from similar attacks. AT&T said Monday most services have been restored. The effects were widespread, with Nashville International Airport halting flights after its internet connections went down and more than a hundred 911 call centers in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama losing data from some callers.
Washington state will weigh a proposed $7.2 million fine for Lumen that’s more than 14 times what the company agreed to pay the FCC in a Dec. 14 settlement for a two-day 911 outage in late 2018 that affected most states (see 2012140058 and 1901280023). Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission staff alleged Tuesday the company, then called CenturyLink, committed about 72,000 violations of four state laws and rules, including 24,000 for failing to transmit 911 calls and 15 for failing to promptly notify public safety answering points (PSAPs) about the outage that affected about 7.4 million state residents. The three-member state commission will schedule a hearing on staff’s recommendation, the UTC said. Staff “found that the outage was due to a preventable technical error and related deficiencies within CenturyLink’s network” and “that CenturyLink incorrectly configured network devices and did not build safeguards into their traffic routing infrastructure, significantly prolonging the outage.” The carrier didn’t provide complete failed-call data requested by the state commission, so staff averaged emergency call volumes to determine the number of possible missed or dropped calls during the outage, the UTC said. The proposed fine is “misguided and misdirected” because a third-party vendor’s faulty network equipment caused the December 2018 outage, a Lumen spokesperson emailed Wednesday. CenturyLink-served PSAPs had no failed 911 calls, she said. “Service providers that rely on CenturyLink’s network to transport their traffic, including 911, may have been impacted. If another provider's 911 service was impacted during the event, it is their responsibility, not CenturyLink’s, to ensure redundancy is built into their network.” The UTC emailed a line in the report: "Regardless of whether a PSAP was receiving service from CenturyLink or Comtech, during phase one all Washington E911 calls were dependent on West, CenturyLink’s vendor, for [automatic location identification] services and on CenturyLink for call origination services." At the time of the outage, CenturyLink managed PSAPs in some of Washington’s most populated counties, including King, Spokane and Snohomish, the report said.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau sought comment Monday on an ATIS letter on efforts to develop a public safety answering point contact information database. ATIS said the database should be made available “at little or no cost to industry and must be less expensive than current processes,” the bureau said in docket 13-75. Comments will be due 30 days after Federal Register publication.
Two thirds of states have a next-generation 911 plan, the Department of Transportation said in an annual report Monday. Based on 2019 data reported by 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., statewide NG-911 plan adoption increased to 33 from 31 in 2018, DOT found. The report found 2,152 public safety answering points across 46 jurisdictions using an ESInet, up from 1,813 across 44 in 2018. Text-to-911 adoption “appears to be a top priority” for many states, with 581,151 texts received in 38 states in 2019, up from 188,646 in 33 states in 2018, the report said.
Five states diverted more than $200 million of 911 fee revenue -- about 6.6% of all such money -- for unrelated purposes in 2019, the FCC reported Tuesday. That’s about $2 million more than the same states were reported to divert in 2018 (see 1912190077). Outgoing Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said he did what he could.
Consumer complaints about Frontier Communications' service quality have risen, according to state commission data obtained by Communications Daily. Regulators in 16 states provided data about 2015-19 complaints voluntarily or through Freedom of Information Act requests. Officials in some states with increasing complaints weren't surprised to see similar problems elsewhere. The telco said it works with state commissions to meet service quality metrics.
Punishing state 911 fee diverters could worsen funding problems for the emergency call system and might be ineffective, commented local and public safety groups this week in docket 20-291. Penalizing local governments for states’ decisions is “much like sending your daughter to bed without dinner because your son took a cookie from the jar without permission,” the National Association of State 911 Administrators (NASNA) responded to the FCC notice of inquiry. “The two siblings are related, but the response is not.”